LACAN BY MARCUS POUND

[Music] well the court was the infantry of psychoanalysis psychoanalysis itself was formulated by freud in the 1890s in vienna le corn was born in paris in 1901 so by the time he was 20 he was really he was really the person who took psychoanalysis into its adolescence prior to that psychoanalysis had been very dominated by the american school of psychoanalysis which was framed in terms of ego psychology ego psychology and much of the assumptions driving that interpretation of freud derives from well freud gives a lovely picture of the psyche and he uses this analogy of a horse rider somebody sitting on the back of this horse trying to steer it across the safe ground and of course the horse this big sort of mass of flesh beneath his legs sort of speeding along but ryder is the ego and it's trying to control its desires in the light of the surrounding countryside so it has a safe passage and this is was taken up by the ego psychologists as really a description of what psychoanalysis should be doing it should be on the basis of the ego using and building its defenses against all these kinds of licentious desires with a view to creating a nice safe passage and and you can see that quite practically actually in the uh american foreign policy the architect of it being henry kissinger a great reader of freud who began to think that all those other sort of warring nation states were desirous and to be controlled through the ego domination of american foreign policy and of course this sort of manifests a little bit later on with star wars project this lovely great sort of ego bubble but this was really what lecorn was trying to challenge and he challenged this in a very simple and elegant way as i said this was france this was a sort of crucible of avant-garde surrealist thinking we had structuralism we had various forms of philosophy and phenomenology heidegger was being interpreted and we have all these streams feeding in we have this important emphasis on language and what lecorn does is very simple he basically says everything freud said was true but really he was talking about language so if we take the edible complex for example that's not so much a biological story about our desires for our mother and our murderous desires towards our father it's really a story about how we enter language and of course this changes the whole dynamic of how we approach psychoanalysis because the thing about language the thing about what makes language meaningful when we put it within a structuralist context and this is very important the corn is interested in language as a structure we tend to think of things in terms of feelings and emotions now but lucoma is interested in nice cold structures what are the relationships that make think what are the relationships that make thought think the way it does and if we're going to say that what makes us as a human being and the subject is language and what makes meaning in language is really the way that signifiers are organized in relation to each other then that shifts the whole basis of how we understand the subject the subject cannot be this simple ego dominating subject that tries to quash all its desires now this is uh most um succinctly summed up in le corn's claim that the unconscious is structured like a language the unconscious is structured like a language in other words it's a structure the unconscious is a structure language is a structure it has grammar and it has rules etc when we enter into the analysts um you know a clinic for example we we enter into a sort of a kind of formal arrangement an understanding about how people speak etc and so there's a kind of structure within there the unconscious is structured like a language but it also means it also means that the unconscious functions in the way that language kind of functions so as i said language is both inside and it's outside and so if we say the unconscious is structured like a language then actually we can begin to read the unconscious much more confidently in what we say and do now of course we must take into account that there's a sort of general skepticism about language which really pervades a lot of post-modern thought oh i can never say what i mean words get in the way of the real world etc etc i'm not quite sure where this pessimism came from but language is really quite amazing because every now and again we actually say what we mean you know language can hit the mark make the bullseye so to speak you know the classic example of that of course is the freudian slip you say one thing and you mean your mother at that point that's the point of which you actually speak the truth language can speak the truth the unconscious is not simply buried away inside us it's in what we do and what we say and so rather than simply have psychoanalysis as a place where we can build up the strong defenses of the ego against our various desires the aim is to entertain a conversation well perhaps not even a conversation but to entertain speech to speak without sensor and then what's required is a very imminent practice of listening and intervening trying to understand exactly what is the significance in what we're saying so um one way to describe this uh imminent practice um it's a little bit like the old problematic of where do you hide a murdered body well you hide it in a battlefield where do you hide a leaf you hide it in a forest where do you hide a diamond you hide it in the chandelier if you're going to hide something the best place to put it is in full view and what better full view could you have than in speech so the unconscious when the corn says the unconscious is structured like a language we can take that as a very empowering uh statement which can encourage us to think very much about what we are saying and not so much think about um you know these sort of repressed desires inside but actually listen to the way that desire is already operative in what we say and how we speak and what we speak about etc so the unconscious is structured like a language and as i say this brings back the corn to the central problematic of the relationship between the analyst and what lecorn called the analyzand the inalizant that's the gerund form of analyst and it makes it a kind of it what it does is it stops if you call somebody a patient it makes them very passive in the experience i'm the doctor you're the patient i administer to you and the patient doesn't really do much apart from perhaps take some medication but uh in calling them the analysis he's really trying to say that they have a very active part in this process because it is about speech now this had enormous implications and ramifications for the whole practice and it got the corn into a lot of trouble uh probably one of the most important um things he introduced was the short session psychoanalytic um sessions tend to be about 50 minutes i think it was 50 minutes because they thought that the analysts should have perhaps 10 minutes to go to the toilet between the patients it's quite an arbitrary number but sometimes sometimes when we're talking we can reach a point of conclusion we can say something very meaningful and thereafter anything that we're likely to say in the session is really just sort of you know just sort of padding out because the significance of what we said may have already been picked up and often when you end a session when you end a psychoanalytic session you might be inclined to imbue it with meaning anyway regardless of how long it was so there's 50 minutes you're still going to pick up on the last thing you said as being the meaningful moment why did we end there what was it i said about that moment and the corn thought that because we're dealing with speech and the unconscious but we ought to be engaging and we ought to be allowing the analytic session to be governed by the process of speech so one could easily imagine for example somebody coming in and talking for example discovering um let's say uh you know having a little revelatory moment about the way something they've said returns to them in a new light uh and that really after you know as i say thereafter it all really becomes just sort of extra extra padding the corn's point was but let's end it there and use that productively so that they take what we said at that moment this was seen as very problematic very problematic french psychoanalysts at this time in paris were really trying to gain accreditation by the international psychoanalytic association the ipa and and this was largely successful but the ipa were very worried about the corn and this idea that people were coming into sessions they were talking and then regardless of the 50 minutes some were having short sessions some were having long sessions and they thought this was a dangerous abuse of power on the part of the analyst and so actually the french psychoanalysts were eventually sort of accredited by the ap ipa but only on the condition that the corn himself was expelled now lecorn then went on he was a kind of he was pretty much a nomad after that um he was taken in by people like alfusa and levy strauss at various institutions across paris during the time but he pretty much ended up a maverick with his own school and his own set of seminars and it's probably at this point uh worth saying something about his teaching practices le corma's not a great writer well in fact he was a great writer but he was not a great writer he was not somebody who devoted an enormous amount of time to writing it was not his preferred medium we have some two volumes of edited essays uh over his sort of um you know over his you know the entire span of his career really but what he did do was hold weekly sessions first at st anne's hospital and then when he was sort of um sort of thrown out of the uh the the the spa the society for french psychoanalysts in paris um when he was thrown out of them he started working in a philosophy department and what this meant was that he had a very diverse group of people he was now talking to he's not just talking to clinicians in a hospital he's talking to philosophers and theologians again we have all these crucible of ideas sort of feeding into all of it and the corn it's fair to say made the seminars a very important cultural event within paris at those times there's some lovely clips of him at louvain turning up and the cheers the packed auditoriums he was very much a performer corn and this really makes sense again it comes back to the question of speech psychoanalysis is the talking cure and so the best and most effective means of teaching is through talking rather than say writing books and these all sorts of celebrities and famous philosophers would turn up to these seminars there were great cultural events and during this period he really systematically worked through the entirety of freud's canon as i say rewriting this on the whole of the structural linguistics now if we'd think about lecorne's thought his meta psychology and how he puts this all together there's really probably three aspects a little bit like freud's id ego and superego uh lacon comes up with his own sort of taxonomy the imaginary the symbolic and the real this is metapsychology these are the three sort of principle blocks that orientate all psychological thinking so if we just start with the imaginary briefly the imaginary again take the word at its face value imaginary the image the imaginary stands if you will for the area of of wholeness it derives from an early experiment he did with a small sort of uh well actually it's an experiment that was done by i think henry wallen uh with a small six month old child and a chimpanzee a small baby chimpanzee and one noticed the difference between the two if you put a small chimpanzee in front of a mirror it very quickly loses its losers interest in the mirror but if you put a small child in front of the mirror not only will it be fascinated by that but it'll be fascinated for the rest of its life every shot window it's going to walk past it's going to be stealing a glance of itself and what is it about the human that makes it so absolutely you know you know sort of fall in love with its own image well part of the reasons physiological as humans we're born but we're born prematurely we can't feed ourselves we can't walk we can't clothe ourselves we rely on somebody to do it for us we're uncoordinated in our body movements but when we look in a mirror the mirror responds to us exactly as we do so in the mirror we see this promise of the unity of the human subject wow i can be a whole and complete thing and this is very important it's this drive for completeness and wholeness that was very much driving the early interpretation of freud so when freud is uh when the freudians were positing that we need to sure up the ego defenses against this sort of murderous world lacon was saying well actually you're just creating an illusion for yourself you're just creating an illusion if you think about um collectors what do people do who collect why do we collect um anybody who's bought a big volume of work will know that absolute satisfaction when you put it on the shelf and it's called complete it's the promise of completeness it's the imaginary identification but of course the one thing that you can't include in any sort of collection whether it's whimsies books or whatever is yourself so there's always something missing which is why we can never really have this big ego bubble and of course if we start to underpin what it is to be human with language well language introduces all sorts of problems of lack into the human subjects all sorts of problems of lack and here we move on to the second if you will of freud's big sort of free orders of the psyche the symbolic we've had the imaginary and now this is the symbolic and actually in in a in a in a strange way these kind of um chart a trajectory of lacon's teaching overall so in his early work he's very interested in this in the imaginary in his middle period he's interested in the symbolic and as we'll get to in his latter period he's interested in the real so what's the symbolic well the symbolic i suppose in its simplest terms we can just say it's language really but what does it mean to say it's language well let's take a subject uh you know let's take a subject like god as soon as we say god exists or i believe god exists we introduce the possibility that god doesn't exist by by virtue of the very assertion and le corn's point is that as soon as we start to talk and become uh you know and function within language we're not only not only do we have the creative power to talk and be social but language brings with it this inherent lack the possibility of non-being it's well so we have the imaginary which is wholeness and we have the symbolic which is really as i say language law but it introduces what in freudian terms we might call castration you know language and law sort of puts a big bar across us um you think for example of um the guy who goes out and buys one of those really nice sort of fancy ferraris he's divorced he's got a bit of extra cash now and uh you know he's sort of um he goes out and it's you know it's the ultimate sign of male sort of potency big red ferrari but of course as soon as he gets it on the road the first thing he has to do is press the limiter switch because the car's too fast for the road so of course you know we have all these great big signs we finally get to have the things we want but of course the real lesson is that ultimately we're castrated and le corn's point is that whatever it is that we do we try to accede to is always underwritten in this way by a certain lack by something that just can't be spoken another way to put this quite simply is to say that any kind of system any kind of system that you bring into existence always necessarily ends up occluding its point of origin so for example we can see but actually in order to see we have the sort of fiber optics in our eyes disappearing out of the retina into the brain and that little point at the back back of the eye where the optic fibers disappear sort of reappears in our vision as a blind spot we can see but only on the condition that we somehow seed a portion of sight itself so all that we end up doing in life always seems to be underwritten in some way by a sense of lack and this becomes his big challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment but psychoanalysis is not simply about trying to sure up our sense of self it's not simply trying to make us function better so we can be happy and productive citizens it's really trying to get us to understand and in some senses reconcile us with the lack that underpins what it is to be a human being and moving on to the third order of the psyche that lecorn introduces which really takes up his later work he calls it the real the real and again you might think of the real as you know sort of like the hard inert sort of material reality that we live in but lacon's point is is almost the exact opposite but in any field you could say that when we come into existence we have to give something up like the guy who buys the ferrari and has to put the limiter switch on we have to give something up and what we give up because we've given it up as a condition of being speaking beings sort of returns within the symbolic but it returns as the real it returns as a kind of absence but it's an absence that is felt nonetheless you might think for example of the black hole stephen hawkins the famous discovery and um you know because you can't actually see what a black hole is because no light escapes the only thing that you can see is the way that it disturbs and affects the you know the surrounding orbit and the surrounding planets and that's quite a good description of of what the corn is trying to get at particularly in regard of this emphasis on structure what is it about what we say or or rather how does what we say become refracted or warped by these strange kinds of absences that we can never quite put our fingers on you can imagine for example that i don't know a young lady might or a young man might sort of you know smile at you and it can incite your desire [Music]

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

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Id: 0IxKzk8JHO0

Length: 22min 39sec (1359 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2013